Economic Opportunity and Evolution: Beyond Landscapes and Bounded Rationality

Issue 4International audienceThe nature of economic opportunity has recently received significant attention in entrepreneurship and strategy. The notion of search on an (NK) opportunity landscape has been particularly relevant to these conversations and debates. We argue that existing notions of landscapes are overly focused on bounded rationality and search (often instantiated as the problem of NP-completeness), rather than focusing on how to account for the readily manifest, emergent novelty we see in the economic sphere (the “frame problem”). We discuss the entrepreneurial and economic implications of these arguments by building on unique insights from biology, the natural and computational sciences